Mobile Phone Manufacturing In India Moves To The Next Phase

The Indian mobile phone industry is the fastest growing in the world and we continue to add more mobile connections every month than any other country in the world. The current telecom boom in the country provides a great opportunity to global and Indian handset manufacturers.

- EB Bureau

India is currently facing the on-slaught of Chinese phones, which account for as much as 25 per cent of the market. India overtook the USA to become the second largest global smartphone market in terms of users in early 2016, and is on track to cross the half a billion smartphone users mark within the next five years. In this five-year period, close to a billion smartphones, together with almost half a billion feature phones that will be sold in India, will consume more than US$ 80 billion worth of components. This offers a huge opportunity to manufacture mobile phones in India and increasingly source components locally, thus reducing the dependence on imports.

The Make in India initiative helped create 48,000 jobs in the mobile phone manufacturing industry in the country in 2016, and the number of jobs in this space is expected to triple in five years.

The present and the future

A joint study by IIM Bangalore (IIMB) and Counterpoint Researchers has analysed the current state of mobile phone manufacturing in India and provided detailed recommendations on the steps to be taken for a phased manufacturing approach.

Releasing the report, Aruna Sundararajan, secretary, Ministry of Electronics and IT (MeitY), Government of India, pointed out that there is plenty of work ahead on fronts such as the tariff regime, skills development, design knowledge and the creation of a strong infrastructure to aid the formation of electronics manufacturing clusters. She added that the government would have to work with local industry and several partners to achieve progress in this field.

She also announced that the government was sending close to a 100 design engineers to Taiwan to learn important facets of aligning product design with customer needs from their Taiwanese counterparts.